PyDev of the Week: Ian Cordasco

This week we welcome Ian Cordasco as our PyDev of the Week. He is a very active contributor to many Python-related projects, such as Requests, Flake8, PyFlakes and much more. Let’s spend some time getting to know our fellow Pythonista!

Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc):

My educational background is in pure and applied mathematics. While I was in college, I taught myself programming as a hobby and began contributing to various open source projects; I took over maintenance of Flake8 and became a core contributor to Requests while I was creating github3.py.

I work for Rackspace on OpenStack, our Private Cloud solution based on the OpenStack Ansible project, and other related projects.

In my free time, I:

work on various OSS projects (see list below)

mentor marginalized people looking to become OSS contributors

play guitar (which I’ve done since I was 7)

blog

Why did you start using Python?

Quite simply, I wanted to build an application in Django with my brother. At the time I knew C and a little Java, but Python seemed to be a much better choice.

What other programming languages do you know and which is your favorite?

Ruby, Clojure, Bash, C, a litte Rust, a little Java, some Perl.

If Python’s included, then obviously Python. Otherwise, I’m a little torn between Ruby and Clojure. Both are a lot of fun to use. Once I get some more Rust under my belt, though, I think that’ll become another favorite of mine as I already like it a lot.

What projects are you working on now?

I have a couple projects I’m working on privately before open sourcing them. Other than that, I’m usually working on a couple of the following:

Requests

Flake8

Pep8

McCabe

PyFlakes

Twine

Requests-Toolbelt

github3.py

rfc3986

uritemplate.py

Betamax

Or something else.

Which Python libraries are your favorite (core or 3rd party)?

I don’t really have a favorite. That is to say, I use certain libraries frequently, but that doesn’t make them my favorites.

Is there anything else you’d like to say?
Follow your passions. If you’re trying to learn to program or become involved in OSS, your passions will make you successful. If your goal is to only contribute to large, well-known projects that you aren’t passionate about, you’ll become bored quickly and lose interest. If you find projects (or even create them) that you’re passionate about, you’ll have a lot more success as a programmer and as an OSS contributor.